“It started to get, actually, really stressful really early on. But because it was so, like, zing, like we’re so compatible, and so intense, we just get each other, it was worth putting up with a lot of shit, basically, for me.“

“And I think it was a moment of, just…my critical thinking stopped. Because I couldn’t parse this fact that he was telling me something that I knew not to be true.”

“It was so fast, it was so intense, and…he hadn’t checked in with me to see how I felt about it. He hadn’t given thought to how it would affect his other relationships, how it would affect his relationship with me.”

“And it was sort of like, we’d established that I was in the wrong, and that I was just weak and unstable. And he could come and take care of me, and now we were okay again.“

“He just always expected—he could do anything he wanted, and I would just handle it. It always defaulted to being my job to just make sure everything was okay, while he did what he wanted. And I never got that from him.”

“I remember driving home on the freeway and repeatedly thinking about driving the van off the road, just wanting to drive off the road and end it. “

“I was with professional colleagues. And he was sitting next to me, and he just started groping me, like putting his hands all over me…And I kept pushing his hands off of me. And I’d pull away, and he’d like move closer, and I’d push his hands off me and he’d put them back on.“

“And everything that he did after that feels like it was entirely around either trying to gaslight me into thinking I didn’t have the experience that I was having, or trying to convince other people that I was crazy or malicious or lying or abusive.”

“I just felt like I had to understand what was real. Like, I had to get to the bottom of it, and to get to the bottom of it, I had to talk to the other women.”